Drive.ai Wants to Help Self-Driving Cars Interact With Pedestrians

As part of a kit it's using to transform normal cars into self-driving vehicles, Drivi.ai is using a large, digital sign to tell pedestrians what these cars are doing.

Addicted to your apps? You're hardly alone. According to a new report from comScore, smartphone apps are taking up an increasingly larger percentage of your smartphone time. Apps now account for half of all the time an average person spends on his or her smartphone—a figure that's up from 41 percent back in June of 2014. The news is also a measure of just how much people use their smartphones versus flipping on a tablet or switching over to a desktop PC.

"The high usage of smartphone apps compared to other media touchpoints shouldn't come as much of a shock when you think about your daily online behavior. Chances are when you want to know what's happening around the world, or in pop culture, or in your friends' lives, your first move is to reach into your pocket and open one of the number of different social apps on your phone. And unless you already happen to be sitting at a computer, a smartphone app is probably your first option when you decide to listen to music, get directions to a destination, check the weather or catch up on email," reads a statement from comScore.

"The convenience factor is simply too powerful. You almost always have your smartphone on you, and apps allow you to immediately access a service in one simple tap of the screen. As smartphone screens have gotten larger and as 4G LTE networks enable faster speeds, there becomes even less of a reason to use other platforms such as desktop or tablets, save for specific tasks."

Related Articles

While much has been written about the growth of chatbots and how these intelligent messaging services or digital assistants might one day overtake the need for a person to have all sorts of diverse apps on his or her phone, we're not there yet. And some of these chatbots—like those built into Facebook Messenger—still force people to use an app anyway, while will likely secure the aforementioned app's position on the top-ten most-used apps list for some time.

A recent comScore analysis notes that the Facebook app commands 150 million unique visitors across smartphones and tablets as of July 2016—the most-used mobile app in the U.S. As Quartz notes, these super-popular apps (like Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and YouTube) account for a large chunk of people's total smartphone time: more than three-fourths, according to comScore research from last year.

"In the near term smartphone apps are likely to grow their share of digital beyond the 50% mark, but desktop and tablets will maintain critical roles in consumers' online consumption for the foreseeable future. It's important, however, that publishers and advertisers understand the outsized influence that smartphone apps have and will continue to have, and that they plan their digital strategies with this information in mind," reads comScore's statement.

About the Author

David Murphy got his first real taste of technology journalism when he arrived at PC Magazine as an intern in 2005. A three-month gig turned to six months, six months turned to occasional freelance assignments, and he has since rejoined his tech-loving, mostly New York-based friends as one of PCMag.com's news contributors.

His rise to (self-described) fame in the world of tech journalism began during his stint as an associate editor at Maximum PC, where his love of cardboard-based PC construction and meetings put him in charge of approximately 10 of the magazine's reviewing beats or sections. His sultry bass tones could be found on more than 70 of the ... See Full Bio